Trump Is Just the Gilded Nail in the Coffin of the American Century |
It is tempting to distill all the chaos, hatred, and blood spilled in 2025 into the small frame of one man: Donald Trump.
It is true that Trump richly deserves the accolade of being the worst, but also the most consequential president in modern US history.
This president has bombed Iran, allowed Israel to invade Southern Syria, finished the decimation of Gaza, and embarked on the annexation of the occupied West Bank. The Emirati-funded and armed ethnic cleansing of Sudan means little to him. A death toll of up to half a million Sudanese is of no consequence.
Three months after unveiling his "big beautiful peace plan," a reality is established on the ground in Gaza that is its parametrical opposite—an ugly, petty recipe for war without end.
Never has so much been expected of a mind that is truly so small.
Israel is not even content to leave over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza shivering and starving in tents. When storms flooded them out, Israelis cheered.
Killing Palestinians has become an Israeli national obsession.
Israel Katz, the defense minister, has just announced plans to settle northern Gaza permanently: “We are deep inside Gaza and we will never leave all of Gaza; there will be no such thing. We are here to protect and prevent what happened," Katz said.
So much for any hope of a full withdrawal envisaged by the Trump plan.
Bounced like a pinball between Moscow and Kyiv, Trump has been unable to secure in Ukraine in a year what he promised as a candidate to achieve within days.
When Bob Reiner, a Hollywood director and long-time critic, was killed along with his wife by his son, in a family tragedy so deep it should elicit sympathy from any parent, Trump’s bile could not contain itself.
Reiner’s death was his own fault because he had driven others "crazy" with his obsession with Donald Trump, the president declared on Truth Social.
This is the mentality of the man to whom every rich Arab state in the Middle East has paid good money and now looks to for salvation.
Never has so much been expected of a mind that is truly so small.
This is the man whom Syria expects to force Israel to stop arming the Druze in Sweida, as a Washington Post investigation disclosed.
This is the man whom Turkey hopes will force the Kurds to join the as-yet nonexistent national armed forces of Syria; the man whom Qatar hopes will install an international stabilization force on the borders of Gaza, the man from whom Saudi Arabia wants a nuclear reactor, the man on whom the leader of Egypt—most likely the next Arab leader to fall—depends on for his very survival.
The only power that profits from this chaos is the power that is not involved: The meta story of 2025 is the confirmation of China as crown prince, as a world leader in waiting—a rise that has been handed to it on a silver plate.
More valuable to China than all its own strategic patience, planning, and thinking added together has been the moral collapse of America. All China has had to do is weather Trump’s tariff tantrums and watch the US collapse unprompted under its own weight.
How did the US pluck defeat from the jaws of victory? Arrogance, hubris, the belief that as the last man standing, we were the only man standing, are all part of the story.
So the outgoing liberal elites of America and Europe, who have been in power for so long, are surely deluding themselves if they ascribe the chaos of 2025 to the rise of the extreme right at home and abroad.
We are not only seeing out one terrible year, but the first quarter of the century. It has been a terrible start.
The wars fought in defense of democracy destroyed all belief in the system at home.
If you compare how powerful America and the West were in Christmas 1991, when I watched the Soviet flag descend on the building of the Russian Supreme Soviet and chart a course to where they are now, you can only come to one conclusion: that when America had the chance to become the world’s uncontested leader, it blew it.
In 1991, America held the monopoly over the use of force abroad. Today, there are as many drone attacks as there are state actors or non-state actors who own them.
In 1991, Russia was on its knees. Today, its forces menace not just Ukraine but the whole of Western Europe.
In 1991, the streets of Russia were so pro-Western that there was a debate in the media as to whether they should continue using the word West, as Russia was now part of it.
Today, they are prepared to sacrifice a whole generation of Russian youth in a war that is framed in Moscow as a war with America.
Losing wars is another part of the jigsaw.
The Pentagon and NATO headquarters in Brussels should really have asked themselves a long time ago, why Western alliances "of the willing" have not won a war since Kosovo in 1998.
Interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria have all been defeats. Whether those interventions were declared or undeclared, whether they were led from the front or from behind closed doors, the result was the same.
The quick thrill of toppling regimes was followed in each country by the sober reality of insurgency, civil war, and ultimately military withdrawal.
Ideology also played its part. I do not mean the ideology of "radical Islam," but the ideology that made the US and its allies such an aggressive world force.
It goes far beyond 19th-century imperialism, which, by comparison, was fairly limited in its ambitions.
It is the belief that at any one time in history, Western liberal democracy is faced by an implacable, transnational, and existential foe.
During the Cold War, it was communism. After it, al-Qaeda became a world threat. Then came Daesh, or the so-called Islamic State.
Today, it is the Muslim Brotherhood; and soon, it will be Islam itself.
Even though these imagined foes have nothing in common with each other, they are given the same characteristics.
During the